I know. But what can you do... it's like the anti-nuclear-power gang. If they weren't so.... you know... we'd have already done the research to fund real nuclear waste recycling instead of just stockpiling it.
It brings a tear to my eye when I think of what the 'green' lobby has done to stifle environmental progress. It does seem that they're actually more than happy with the building and operation of coal plants after all.
you are a stupid punkass fool. I'd like to see you dropped into a maximum security prison out in the open and watch what happened to you when you
told the inmates that they were not being punished. Your life would be very short and involve a lot of
pain from that moment until you were finished, which would be a few minutes at most.
Far better to lock this guy up for the rest of his natural life so that you can retain the "moral high ground" -- whilst also ensuring that he does suffer for his crime, for a lot longer than a few minutes on a table or in a chair.
This is the nub of the issue for me. Why do we seek to execute Islamic terrorists when that is exactly what they want?
Far better to sentence them to an entire lifetime of suffering behind the walls of a US prison. Myself, I can't imagine a worse fate; it's nasty, it's cold but somehow it's more HUMANE.
Love it. If death is what they crave, if death is what they expect - give 'em life!
If you don't care about it, you can look at other stories that talk about tesla and bill gates and whatever else. Posting is not mandatory.
I'm not sure his point was that he didn't care about it.
I also found the summary fairly opaque, although that is likely a reflection of my minimal understanding of math and physics. The editors usually provide summaries of complex topics that are a little more approachable for the layman but I suppose I could always flout the law and RTFA.
- white people are to blame for most of the bad things, ever
Most people would just call you a blatant racist at this point and move on.
Serious question here: I see this word being thrown around a lot of late and I'm curious to know what exactly about this comment you thought was racist.
[snip]..if they didn't honor your agreement by paying for your proscribed hours, take them to court for breach of contract.
That response is pretty combative and runs the risk of earning a black mark against oneself, easily done in the small-ish community that is IT. Not necessarily the best strategy when starting out. May not necessarily be the best strategy even when established.
When contracting, both the end user and the placement company are one's customers. I know nothing of matters legal in the States but my general sense of caution suggests taking a deep breath and maybe a short walk before giving serious thought to taking one's customers into litigation.
I'm sorry you've copped a bit of flak over your past role. I can only guess at how many people are hurting because of this practice and I feel for them. Personally I'm grateful for you having shared your experience.
I'm not in the US but like many western nations, NZ is only a decade or so behind North America on a lot of matters social, commercial and otherwise. It seems wise to keep an eye on the US mood, naturally for myself but also because of my general nerdly concern for geeks in need. Nobody who appreciates skills can easily witness good knowledge workers lose much or all of what they've achieved financially for no good reason. I feel quite sad when I think of those forced to sit on their hands while third parties do a poor job of the work they used to take pride in performing themselves.
The first way to combat this 'corporate capture' of the H1B programme is a general understanding of its premise and mechanisms amongst the IT community. We're more than capable of understanding the legislation, although it is admittedly rather tedious reading. Anecdotes such as yours help us appreciate a little of the legal process, the administrative dodge and the half-truths that keep this race-to-the-bottom operation running.
Of course, but unless I'm mistaken I don't think we yet have a working example of a gigawatt-class solar power plant with battery storage yet. Even for home use it's not just a simple matter of slapping up some panels, it's a significant investment that needs to be costed carefully.
TL;DR: solar isn't baseload and it's silly to oversimplify the situation as nuke vs solar. We need 'em both and more besides.
Now the goal is to have robots pick so many strawberries, that you need to hire more people for your strawberry processing plant where you make jams, pies, ice creams...
That's how you pay those pickers more - by creating better paying jobs.
..jobs that are themselves increasingly under threat from automation.:)
Great post though and I don't disagree with you. We certainly are living in interesting times.
Good post. I'm not sure I understand the engineering challenges sufficiently to critique your proposal but we do need to be thinking along these lines.
Personally, I love nuclear power. I'm very, very fond of hydro, pleased as punch with wind generation and have a special place in my heart for geothermal power production.
Where we are right now we haven't the luxury of time to overlook any sustainable power generation technology. Each has its place and we need them all if we're going to successfully transition from fossil fuels.
Life is so hard, isn't it, just one insurmountable problem after another.
Life is what we make it of course, your snark notwithstanding.
It is however made no easier when fools like the AC above insist that complex situations be childishly boiled down to simple black-and-white 'Mr. Nuke vs Mrs. Family Solar' false dichotomies.
The only 'insurmountable problem' I feel we have is the continuing riches we're taking from the bottomless mine of our own collective stupidity.
"....they do not work well as a baseload". Mr.Nuke, please enlighten us with arguments iso fud. Thank you, Family Solar
I think a little phenomenon called the 24-hour day/night cycle of our little planet is all the argument he might need to counter your kindergarten-level rebuttal. Perhaps instead there's something magical about your 'Family Solar' that I've missed that you might like to share with the rest of us?
Only idiots on Winblows are affected, and you don't want their business anyway. They have no awareness.
Thanks for that segue. Now, back in the real world, one doesn't usually have the luxury of choosing one's customers. Furthermore, one very seldom has the opportunity to choose the customer's home PC environment for them either.
People in the real world make decisions based upon their personal and business needs; the black-and-white views of basement-dwelling trolls tend to factor less into their calculations than you might expect. No, really.
Looking at the comment following yours it appears you have some sort of anonymous fool throwing mud at your proposition. Unsurprisingly they offer nothing by way of improvement on your position. I guess it's more fun for a shallow mind to follow mud with mud than attempt a reasoned argument.
I'm sure you're hardly bothered by such idiocy but I wanted to take a moment to point out that in my humble opinion your post provides a beautifully elegant and balanced summary of the scientific method at work. Perhaps it's original; perhaps instead it's ancient and I'm showing myself to be embarrassingly poorly read by failing to recognise its origin. Either way I find it inspirational, thank you.
I chose to reply rather than mod you up because I found your post remarkable and.. well, I guess I needed to remark upon it. Apologies if the points would have been of greater value to you!
I do not think people who rely on medication like Adderall or antidepressants should be allowed to drive.
Wow, I found myself so annoyed by your post I wanted to reply with "Fuck you!" However that's hardly constructive, even if it is in character. (Yeah, I'm trying to evolve.)
Anyway: some of us are productive, helpful, compassionate and useful members of society, but only when we take our medication on a regular basis. Typically we're not proud of that fact but it beats the alternative.
If it helps you feel better: when some of us identified by this generalisation fail to take our medication - for whatever reason - we suffer a special kind of agony that cannot be described or explained adequately to someone who does not need medication to function normally. Consider it a significant punishment, if that eases your conscience. In my own experience I've found it can take weeks to fully return to normal.
Would you feel as coldly towards a person suffering diabetes? A person who needs daily finger-prick blood testing and may even require insulin injections?
We didn't get to choose our brains or our bodies, just like you didn't get to choose yours.
Besides, if I had a choice I'd naturally rather be a unicorn, just like every other sane person out there.
[snip] the employees are going to damned sure be loyal, because they won't have a choice... as you've aptly pointed out, where the hell else are they going to go that pays that well for so little?
Golden handcuffs are still chains of bondage, that is true enough.
At least they'll have an opportunity to make some intelligent decisions about their extra income, perhaps some might start that nest-egg towards retirement they've been wanting to kick off but haven't had the funds to do so until now.
As a general comment, life can be pretty tight financially when earning less than $40k. For example here in Auckland I'm paying $35kp/a just in rent for a nasty cold 3brm house with no heating/aircon, no carpeting, peeling paint and a bushy garden/yard that costs me another $1.5kp/a to keep tidy.
Those golden handcuffs on offer sound.. surprisingly attractive, now that I think about it.:)
If you honestly don't think that prices at stores / restaurants will increase to reflect that higher minimum wage, you know nothing about economics.
Precisely and well said. This is (another) great reason why people who like to clamour "there should be a tax on that" to every perceived injustice should be ignored (or preferably, loudly refuted) for their short-sightedness.
Increasing minimum wage, 'taxing the rich' and slapping tariffs and fees around will certainly have consequences, however they may not necessarily be the intended consequences.
Maybe raising minimum wage to $15/hr in this case is actually the right thing to do, but such a decision isn't the simple matter a lot of people make it out to be.
So as far as I'm concerned him giving up his salary was a great business decision which results in him having the ability to say he doesn't make that much money...
Would it be cheeky of me to suggest this results in a win/win for his staff, his business and himself personally?
I know he'll gather a bunch of ancillary benefits by doing so however he's not breaking the law by doing so. Perhaps my judgement is clouded because his 'use of the system' seems a whole lot less shady than the Big Money game MS, Google, Apple, et al play to avoid corporate tax.
Thanks Bruce, it's often in these little nuances that I catch myself staring into space, contemplating the sheer enormity of what has been achieved here. The skills of these people - to do what they're doing with the budget at their disposal - almost completely wrecks my personal 'scale of difficulty'. I thought I understood what they meant by 'It really IS rocket science,' but I'm really not even close.
We really must be living in the future: small, agile, private enterprises taking the reigns of progress from state-level actors. NASA are by no means obsolete, if anything they've adapted rather well for a bureaucracy of their size and are continuing to do amazing science.
Budgets might be tighter than we'd like but I can't help feeling like we're entering a golden era of space exploration and related technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
At any rate, it's a lot closer to $30k than $25k.
Five grand extra is chump change to business owners considering a Baxter-style robot solution.
I'm gob-smacked by how ridiculously cheap this technology has become and how fast the costs have fallen.
He probably assumed it was a typo and didn't want to upset you by writing (sic) when quoting your post, no need to invoke genocide or nazis.
Unless you want to, of course.
I know. But what can you do ... it's like the anti-nuclear-power gang. If they weren't so .... you know ... we'd have already done the research to fund real nuclear waste recycling instead of just stockpiling it.
It brings a tear to my eye when I think of what the 'green' lobby has done to stifle environmental progress. It does seem that they're actually more than happy with the building and operation of coal plants after all.
you are a stupid punkass fool. I'd like to see you dropped into a maximum security prison out in the open and watch what happened to you when you told the inmates that they were not being punished. Your life would be very short and involve a lot of pain from that moment until you were finished, which would be a few minutes at most.
Looks like you've rehabilitated nicely.
Far better to lock this guy up for the rest of his natural life so that you can retain the "moral high ground" -- whilst also ensuring that he does suffer for his crime, for a lot longer than a few minutes on a table or in a chair.
This is the nub of the issue for me. Why do we seek to execute Islamic terrorists when that is exactly what they want?
Far better to sentence them to an entire lifetime of suffering behind the walls of a US prison. Myself, I can't imagine a worse fate; it's nasty, it's cold but somehow it's more HUMANE.
Love it. If death is what they crave, if death is what they expect - give 'em life!
If you don't care about it, you can look at other stories that talk about tesla and bill gates and whatever else. Posting is not mandatory.
I'm not sure his point was that he didn't care about it.
I also found the summary fairly opaque, although that is likely a reflection of my minimal understanding of math and physics. The editors usually provide summaries of complex topics that are a little more approachable for the layman but I suppose I could always flout the law and RTFA.
- white people are to blame for most of the bad things, ever
Most people would just call you a blatant racist at this point and move on.
Serious question here: I see this word being thrown around a lot of late and I'm curious to know what exactly about this comment you thought was racist.
[snip] ..if they didn't honor your agreement by paying for your proscribed hours, take them to court for breach of contract.
That response is pretty combative and runs the risk of earning a black mark against oneself, easily done in the small-ish community that is IT. Not necessarily the best strategy when starting out. May not necessarily be the best strategy even when established.
When contracting, both the end user and the placement company are one's customers. I know nothing of matters legal in the States but my general sense of caution suggests taking a deep breath and maybe a short walk before giving serious thought to taking one's customers into litigation.
just because I misused a word (dyeing is spelled correctly, and if I were speaking and used dyeing instead of dying, you'd be none to wiser).
Judging from the context of your post I'd gently advise you to be careful with those linguistic gymnastics, you might injure yourself. :-p
I'm sorry you've copped a bit of flak over your past role. I can only guess at how many people are hurting because of this practice and I feel for them. Personally I'm grateful for you having shared your experience.
I'm not in the US but like many western nations, NZ is only a decade or so behind North America on a lot of matters social, commercial and otherwise. It seems wise to keep an eye on the US mood, naturally for myself but also because of my general nerdly concern for geeks in need. Nobody who appreciates skills can easily witness good knowledge workers lose much or all of what they've achieved financially for no good reason. I feel quite sad when I think of those forced to sit on their hands while third parties do a poor job of the work they used to take pride in performing themselves.
The first way to combat this 'corporate capture' of the H1B programme is a general understanding of its premise and mechanisms amongst the IT community. We're more than capable of understanding the legislation, although it is admittedly rather tedious reading. Anecdotes such as yours help us appreciate a little of the legal process, the administrative dodge and the half-truths that keep this race-to-the-bottom operation running.
Battery storage?
Of course, but unless I'm mistaken I don't think we yet have a working example of a gigawatt-class solar power plant with battery storage yet. Even for home use it's not just a simple matter of slapping up some panels, it's a significant investment that needs to be costed carefully.
TL;DR: solar isn't baseload and it's silly to oversimplify the situation as nuke vs solar. We need 'em both and more besides.
Now the goal is to have robots pick so many strawberries, that you need to hire more people for your strawberry processing plant where you make jams, pies, ice creams...
That's how you pay those pickers more - by creating better paying jobs.
..jobs that are themselves increasingly under threat from automation. :)
Great post though and I don't disagree with you. We certainly are living in interesting times.
Good post. I'm not sure I understand the engineering challenges sufficiently to critique your proposal but we do need to be thinking along these lines.
Personally, I love nuclear power. I'm very, very fond of hydro, pleased as punch with wind generation and have a special place in my heart for geothermal power production.
Where we are right now we haven't the luxury of time to overlook any sustainable power generation technology. Each has its place and we need them all if we're going to successfully transition from fossil fuels.
Life is so hard, isn't it, just one insurmountable problem after another.
Life is what we make it of course, your snark notwithstanding.
It is however made no easier when fools like the AC above insist that complex situations be childishly boiled down to simple black-and-white 'Mr. Nuke vs Mrs. Family Solar' false dichotomies.
The only 'insurmountable problem' I feel we have is the continuing riches we're taking from the bottomless mine of our own collective stupidity.
"....they do not work well as a baseload". Mr.Nuke, please enlighten us with arguments iso fud. Thank you, Family Solar
I think a little phenomenon called the 24-hour day/night cycle of our little planet is all the argument he might need to counter your kindergarten-level rebuttal. Perhaps instead there's something magical about your 'Family Solar' that I've missed that you might like to share with the rest of us?
Only idiots on Winblows are affected, and you don't want their business anyway. They have no awareness.
Thanks for that segue. Now, back in the real world, one doesn't usually have the luxury of choosing one's customers. Furthermore, one very seldom has the opportunity to choose the customer's home PC environment for them either.
People in the real world make decisions based upon their personal and business needs; the black-and-white views of basement-dwelling trolls tend to factor less into their calculations than you might expect. No, really.
Turing was a faggot who resisted his correction therapy and is a terrible example of a scientist.
Yup, all he came up with was those stupid faggot computers that never worked anyway!
Looking at the comment following yours it appears you have some sort of anonymous fool throwing mud at your proposition. Unsurprisingly they offer nothing by way of improvement on your position. I guess it's more fun for a shallow mind to follow mud with mud than attempt a reasoned argument.
I'm sure you're hardly bothered by such idiocy but I wanted to take a moment to point out that in my humble opinion your post provides a beautifully elegant and balanced summary of the scientific method at work. Perhaps it's original; perhaps instead it's ancient and I'm showing myself to be embarrassingly poorly read by failing to recognise its origin. Either way I find it inspirational, thank you.
I chose to reply rather than mod you up because I found your post remarkable and.. well, I guess I needed to remark upon it. Apologies if the points would have been of greater value to you!
Obvious troll is obvious. Go play somewhere else, kiddo.
I do not think people who rely on medication like Adderall or antidepressants should be allowed to drive.
Wow, I found myself so annoyed by your post I wanted to reply with "Fuck you!" However that's hardly constructive, even if it is in character. (Yeah, I'm trying to evolve.)
Anyway: some of us are productive, helpful, compassionate and useful members of society, but only when we take our medication on a regular basis. Typically we're not proud of that fact but it beats the alternative.
If it helps you feel better: when some of us identified by this generalisation fail to take our medication - for whatever reason - we suffer a special kind of agony that cannot be described or explained adequately to someone who does not need medication to function normally. Consider it a significant punishment, if that eases your conscience. In my own experience I've found it can take weeks to fully return to normal.
Would you feel as coldly towards a person suffering diabetes? A person who needs daily finger-prick blood testing and may even require insulin injections?
We didn't get to choose our brains or our bodies, just like you didn't get to choose yours.
Besides, if I had a choice I'd naturally rather be a unicorn, just like every other sane person out there.
[snip] the employees are going to damned sure be loyal, because they won't have a choice... as you've aptly pointed out, where the hell else are they going to go that pays that well for so little?
Golden handcuffs are still chains of bondage, that is true enough.
At least they'll have an opportunity to make some intelligent decisions about their extra income, perhaps some might start that nest-egg towards retirement they've been wanting to kick off but haven't had the funds to do so until now.
As a general comment, life can be pretty tight financially when earning less than $40k. For example here in Auckland I'm paying $35kp/a just in rent for a nasty cold 3brm house with no heating/aircon, no carpeting, peeling paint and a bushy garden/yard that costs me another $1.5kp/a to keep tidy.
Those golden handcuffs on offer sound .. surprisingly attractive, now that I think about it. :)
If you honestly don't think that prices at stores / restaurants will increase to reflect that higher minimum wage, you know nothing about economics.
Precisely and well said. This is (another) great reason why people who like to clamour "there should be a tax on that" to every perceived injustice should be ignored (or preferably, loudly refuted) for their short-sightedness.
Increasing minimum wage, 'taxing the rich' and slapping tariffs and fees around will certainly have consequences, however they may not necessarily be the intended consequences.
Maybe raising minimum wage to $15/hr in this case is actually the right thing to do, but such a decision isn't the simple matter a lot of people make it out to be.
So as far as I'm concerned him giving up his salary was a great business decision which results in him having the ability to say he doesn't make that much money...
Would it be cheeky of me to suggest this results in a win/win for his staff, his business and himself personally?
I know he'll gather a bunch of ancillary benefits by doing so however he's not breaking the law by doing so. Perhaps my judgement is clouded because his 'use of the system' seems a whole lot less shady than the Big Money game MS, Google, Apple, et al play to avoid corporate tax.
Thanks CastrTroy, I'll pick up a copy - much appreciated!
Thanks Bruce, it's often in these little nuances that I catch myself staring into space, contemplating the sheer enormity of what has been achieved here. The skills of these people - to do what they're doing with the budget at their disposal - almost completely wrecks my personal 'scale of difficulty'. I thought I understood what they meant by 'It really IS rocket science,' but I'm really not even close.
We really must be living in the future: small, agile, private enterprises taking the reigns of progress from state-level actors. NASA are by no means obsolete, if anything they've adapted rather well for a bureaucracy of their size and are continuing to do amazing science.
Budgets might be tighter than we'd like but I can't help feeling like we're entering a golden era of space exploration and related technologies.
Ooooh.. uh, does this make me a Space Nutter?